A Fashion Week Afternoon with Bryanboy, the Last Great Influencer

“I’m so incredibly blessed,” said Bryanboy, perched eagerly on a jade blue sofa in the lounge of New York’s Soho Grand Hotel.

But he doesn’t mean “blessed” in the way that requires “hashtag” as a prefix. “I mean, I feel free. If I were an editor, I’d probably get fired. A writer? My editor would probably fire me. The magazine would probably fire me. I love it. I’m able to say whatever I want to say.”

So he says things like: “Hedi [Slimane] is so late in the program, I can’t even,” referring to the designer’s latest collection, which is unisex.

Or, of a group of activists walking in the Stella McCartney show to demonstrate their support for the designer’s use of vegan fabrics: “I highly doubt these costumes by animal rights group people were made from biodegradable fabrics.”.

And his review, if you will, of Burberry’s most recent collection: “Glammed up sausage casing.”

These are not the typical musings of an editor, as Bryanboy, aka Bryan Grey Yambao, astutely pointed out. But neither are they the expected missives of an influencer, that powerful but mysterious fashion world figure who is dependent upon the goodwill (free bags!) and budgets (pay me to pose with the bags!) of the brands who rely on them to promote their products.

Bryanboy is something a little more sui generis: a bona fide industry fixture who has, for over a decade and a half (!), developed the analytical eye of an old-school fashion critic while also reaping the benefits of an influencer lifestyle, like getting dressed by Prada to attend the Prada show. He also finds himself in something of a strange position: he started as a blogger, the ultimate outsider, but people within the world of fashion have come to rely on him not simply for brand-building but for those unvarnished takes on the industry, fired off to his half a million followers. Recently, he said, the CEO of a Paris fashion brand “came up to me and said, ‘Bryan, I don’t follow you on Instagram. I follow you on Twitter.”

So he still “influences” his digital audience—he was ostensibly in New York to promote the launch of Dior’s new men’s fragrance, along with 30 or so other male influencers, hunk types who “all look nothing like me”—but he’s also become a kind of soothsayer to industry brass. “I see myself as an influencer,” he said, “but on a different scale [than] people who have a million followers.” He has about 564,000 followers on Instagram, which is small-time compared to a mega-fashion influencer like, say, Chiara Ferragni, aka The Blonde Salad, and her 18.6 million followers. “But I see a lot of industry insiders following me,” he said. He removed his gray Prada double-breasted coat—underneath was a black Uniqlo sweater, and Neil Barrett pants he’s worn “for like eight years nonstop”—and placed it gingerly next to a steel gray Hermes Birkin bag, a prized recent acquisition.

He has a finsta, or a secret Instagram, where designers and editors banter with him more freely. And the subversive group he came up with—remember when everyone thought bloggers were going to ruin fashion?—is now firmly ensconced in the establishment. “If Donald Trump can be a hot mess and rule the world,” he said—his skin glowing with that enigmatically moist, rich-girl incandescence; his hair beautifully combed into a champagne blonde wedge—then “I’m not scared to do the same.”

Yes, like the lawless man who tweets what he pleases from a big mansion on a hill, Bryanboy might be the most liberated person in his industry. But it would be a mistake to paint him as a dilettante, or to underestimate him. Because the history of Bryanboy, from his humble blogger beginnings to a lucrative life of fit pic posting from Sweden, is also the history of the last decade in fashion. Which means that wherever Bryanboy goes next—well, that’s probably where fashion is going, too.

Yes, sure, there’s all the influencing. But what does Bryanboy...do? When I ask, he sits up with best-student-in-the-class posture, answering with a clarity sought in vain over the past five years by countless stories about our wild ambivalence towards influencers. “I amplify a brand’s message to my audience.” Ta-da!

This requires Bryanboy to keep a bustling schedule of fashion show attendance that rivals those of top magazine editors. He attends women’s fashion weeks in Milan and Paris and often New York; couture week in Paris; and the menswear shows in Florence, Milan, and Paris. The run lasts as long as a month, with occasional trips home to Sweden, where he moved from New York in 2018, and his banker husband. I had caught him just before the Marc Jacobs show. (“I need some FASHION!” he said on the Uber ride there, delicately dabbing his bud of a mouth with goo from a tin. “I need this show to be good.”)

Perhaps no other influencer covers the industry so thoroughly. “I feel like I’m a unicorn,” he said. “I’m surprised that I’m able to go to women’s and men’s at the same time, when I know so many other influencers [who], if you’re a guy, you’re going to the men’s show zone, and a girl is going to the women’s shows. They don’t really cross-promote.” He added, “I’m just happy that I went to all of these shows first.”

And BryanBoy’s really is a story of firsts. He started Bryanboy.com in 2004, blogging from his parents’ home in Manila. His site was one of the very first fashion blogs, and he was also a part of the great front row mutiny of the late 2000s, in which rapscallion bloggers like Bryanboy, Tavi Gevinson and Tommy Ton were wedged between Vogue editors and other establishment figures. He created many of the unspoken rules that have come to define Instagram influencer culture, navigating the tricky path between taking free stuff and maintaining the critical distance that allows you to be something beyond a paid brand shill. His serious interest in fashion—he knows bylines, editor names, photographer names, and even fashion credits like he might be tested at any moment—and his wicked opinions gave him industry credibility early on, such that Marc Jacobs named a bag after him in 2008. He also built a huge fan base: in the early 2010s, his site boasted some 2 million visitors per month.

But while his other blogger colleagues have moved on to different roles and even industries—Tavi Gevinson is an actress, for example, and Garance Dore recently denounced the fashion industry because of its mania for influencers—Bryanboy has stuck around. He’s managed to pivot at just the right moments throughout his career, somehow becoming one of the purposely fickle industry’s few stalwarts. He’s done so by making choices that seemed stark at the time, and obvious in retrospect. “I stopped having a website probably about two years ago,” he said, “because nobody really goes to a computer anymore. Nobody really goes to websites anymore.”

Instead, he began focusing on his outfit posts on Instagram just as it was becoming fashion’s primary platform, increasingly the place where men and women find out about products, designers, and industry news. (“I am 100% sure she is controlling Mark Zuckerberg,” he jokes—maybe?—of Instagram’s director of fashion partnerships Eva Chen. “She is more powerful than the president of the United States.”) In the meantime, he kept shooting off his naughty takes on Twitter. (And foreshadowing a new generation or hf—or high fashion—twitter users, who prefer 280 character fashion critiques to staged brand partnerships.)

But as Bryanboy’s lady-on-the-gram, freak-on-the-timeline-strategy underscores, the shift from fashion blogging on websites to influencer culture on Instagram took the teeth out of a revolutionary movement. The earliest bloggers were fresh and even significant voices in fashion—Gevinson wrote an incredibly poignant entry on her site after the death of Alexander McQueen, for example. But, as Bryanboy said, “Nobody reads the captions on Instagrams.” And it isn’t merely that they don’t read the captions—it’s that influencer culture has privileged the image over the words. “With Instagram, I have to filter myself in a way,” he acknowledged. And it’s all about creating the same image: everyone posts the same photographs, from the same shows, as a token of credibility, so that brands and consumers continue to take them seriously. Influencing is not so much a way to show followers what’s cool—if it ever was that—but rather a distribution platform for an agreed-upon, codified aesthetic that proves the influencer has earned the name.

But for Bryanboy, the shift toward social media isn’t a matter of brand sensitivity or compromise. He’s just a lot busier than he used to be. “Back in the day, I would write like 800 words in a blog post and post 20 pictures, you know? Now it’s like, I don’t have time. I have not opened my laptop other than when I did my taxes.” He paused. “I don’t have time to sit down here and really, you know, think about something substantial, or write something substantial, you know?”

It’s not just him. “A lot of influencers are freaking out because engagement is so low. The algorithm changes, and then people are moving onto TikTok.” I asked him how he’s been able to adapt continually—his career now seems longer than the tenure of the average designer at a luxury house. “I think you just need to adapt with the times to what you know, to where and how you connect with your audience.”

Now, “I don’t even have time to paint my nails,” and one imagines that his Instagram audience might feel the same way. He’s exploring video, which he thinks “could be something fun to do,” though not TikTok, because “it’s for young people.” (Ok, boomers???)

We went outside to get a car to the Marc Jacobs show. Veronika Heilbrunner, editor-influencer-publisher and wife to Justin O’Shea, joined us. Bryanboy lit a cigarette. “I don’t know,” he said, sounding terribly worried all of a sudden. “Where do you think this is going?”

Before I could answer, Heilbrunner chimed in. “Everyone is always asking this,” she said. “‘What’s next, what’s next, what’s next?’ Who cares?”

“Everyone,” she said, “is our age anyways.”

So what are the monetary realities for an influencer like Bryanboy today? In our post-Fyre Fest world, things seem more...modest. Bryanboy pays for all his travel—he doesn’t like “the obligation” of having to post about a place that’s giving him a discount or freebie—and he doesn’t get paid to go to fashion shows. That’s both on principle and the new way of the world. “And you know, there is no such thing—‘Oh, we’re gonna pay you to sit front-row.’ That is like, 2008, 2009. Times have changed.” Instead, what he gets paid to do are what he calls “activations,” in which he takes over a brand’s social channel for a show, or puts together a series of Instagram stories “surrounding the bag,” for example. He added, “If I have to produce like four pictures, then that’s a sponsored post. So [there are] different kinds of activations, from posting store events, or attending store events, or store openings, or promoting that store.”

When I asked him how much he makes per post, he said, “It ranges.” Enough to pay your rent? “It’s not…. It really depends.” He’s willing to work for less for a brand he really loves that doesn’t have much of a budget. His number is closer, he said, to “the price of a coat.” Like a Chanel coat, or a Tibi coat? “Definitely not a Chanel coat. More like a Gucci coat”—which are mostly in the $3,000-$4,000 range.

Nice work if you can get it, of course, but it also seems like more of a grind than the industry-shaking blogging that earned him his own Marc Jacobs bag. It’s the same exhausting hustle that many an influencer has complained about of late, that is leading marketing gurus to talk about consumers developing “influencer fatigue.”

And even fashion’s first boy is feeling old. Activations add up. “37 is calling!” he jokes. When he’s not traveling for fashion week, he’s primarily posting fit pics from enchanted Swedish forests, which seems like a pretty nice life. How much longer does he envision being an influencer? “Five years. Ten years?” He paused. “Five years. The idea of being 45 and getting photographed—I need to be realistic. You can just Photoshop your face, but it’s not even about that. I mean, I definitely want a private, quiet life. It comes to a point where, you know, even with the events that we go to, it’s very exhausting.” He’s even switched his allegiances in style, from the days when he practically lived in so-called streetstyle bait—who could forget the Margiela fur hat?—to the timeless classics of MaxMara and Michael Kors and Prada. “A rich Caucasian woman situation,” he explained.

Bryanboy’s new uniform is not necessarily in season, nor is it the product of a brand-friendly activation. But clothes, the archetypal influencer is learning, don’t really matter when it comes to who you are. “It’s not necessarily a definition of who I am, because I am who I am with or without clothes. At my house, I’m literally naked.”